‘Aha!’ said Uncle Ned, ’but there’s another man who will have a different awakening.  That fellow in the cart will find he has been too clever by half.’

‘Uncle Ned and Julia,’ said Gideon, ’I am as happy as the King of Tartary, my heart is like a threepenny-bit, my heels are like feathers; I am out of all my troubles, Julia’s hand is in mine.  Is this a time for anything but handsome sentiments?  Why, there’s not room in me for anything that’s not angelic!  And when I think of that poor unhappy devil in the cart, I stand here in the night and cry with a single heart God help him!’

‘Amen,’ said Uncle Ned.

CHAPTER XIII.  The Tribulations of Morris:  Part the Second

In a really polite age of literature I would have scorned to cast my eye again on the contortions of Morris.  But the study is in the spirit of the day; it presents, besides, features of a high, almost a repulsive, morality; and if it should prove the means of preventing any respectable and inexperienced gentleman from plunging light-heartedly into crime, even political crime, this work will not have been penned in vain.

He rose on the morrow of his night with Michael, rose from the leaden slumber of distress, to find his hand tremulous, his eyes closed with rheum, his throat parched, and his digestion obviously paralysed.  ‘Lord knows it’s not from eating!’ Morris thought; and as he dressed he reconsidered his position under several heads.  Nothing will so well depict the troubled seas in which he was now voyaging as a review of these various anxieties.  I have thrown them (for the reader’s convenience) into a certain order; but in the mind of one poor human equal they whirled together like the dust of hurricanes.  With the same obliging preoccupation, I have put a name to each of his distresses; and it will be observed with pity that every individual item would have graced and commended the cover of a railway novel.

Anxiety the First:  Where is the Body? or, The Mystery of Bent Pitman.  It was now manifestly plain that Bent Pitman (as was to be looked for from his ominous appellation) belonged to the darker order of the criminal class.  An honest man would not have cashed the bill; a humane man would not have accepted in silence the tragic contents of the water-butt; a man, who was not already up to the hilts in gore, would have lacked the means of secretly disposing them.  This process of reasoning left a horrid image of the monster, Pitman.  Doubtless he had long ago disposed of the body—­dropping it through a trapdoor in his back kitchen, Morris supposed, with some hazy recollection of a picture in a penny dreadful; and doubtless the man now lived in wanton splendour on the proceeds of the bill.  So far, all was peace.  But with the profligate habits of a man like Bent Pitman (who was no doubt a hunchback in the bargain), eight hundred pounds could be easily melted in a week.  When they were gone, what would he be likely to do next?  A hell-like voice in Morris’s own bosom gave the answer:  ‘Blackmail me.’